1. Introduction
[1.1] In January 2006, a team of more than twenty contributors launched Virtual Firefly (VFF), a fan enterprise that promised to give its readers a taste of what might have been had the cult series Firefly (Fox, 2002–3) completed its first season and gone on to a second. Between 2006 and 2009, VFF contributors published twenty-nine episodes in script form on StillFlying.net, the now-defunct site created to host VFF. StillFlying also featured DVD packaging designs for the virtual series, various behind-the-scenes materials, and an active forum where VFF fans and contributors discussed everything VFF. In their mission statement, contributors characterized the project as a "virtual continuation" of the series that aimed to provide readers with as close an approximation as possible of the actual series. On their staff page, contributors even likened themselves to a "crew," a term that playfully referenced the fictional spaceship crew at the heart of the series—but that also mapped industrial hierarchies of work onto VFF contributors.
[1.2] Framing themselves as a television production crew, the VFF team took on industry titles that approximated what their contributions to a commercial series might have been, a hierarchization of fan labor that Nannicelli (2013) argues is typical of virtual series. For example, VFF's lead writer took on the titles of executive producer and head writer, while other VFF writers were credited as producers, writers, or staff writers. However, the VFF crew also included contributors whose work lacked clear parallels in the television industry. These infrastructural workers received below-the-line industry titles that only obliquely reflected their actual contributions to VFF. For example, the site's designer and primary administrator, Sean Young, was credited as the art and technical director, clearly highlighting his contributions to the series as technical rather than creative. Whenever the work that went into VFF exposed the distance between the project's needs and those of a commercial television production, that work was framed as below-the-line labor in an effort to maintain the illusion that the virtual series was a commercial television product.
[1.3] VFF serves as a case study to consider what it means to be a below-the-line worker within a collaborative fan enterprise. Analysis of the StillFlying forums, which VFF contributors used to discuss site business, reveals how VFF contributors conceived of their project in relation to both Firefly and the broader range of fan fiction. How did VFF writers frame their own creative work in relation to the technical work undertaken by the site's infrastructural contributors? How did VFF contributors and fans characterize infrastructural contributions to the site, and how did they treat infrastructural workers differently than VFF writers? Creative problems, including writer's block and episode delays, were regularly framed on the StillFlying forums as inevitable and collaborative, with writers turning to each other and to readers for help. By contrast, VFF contributors and users alike framed infrastructural problems as urgent and unacceptable—the responsibility of particular below-the-line members of the site's volunteer staff. In other words, industrial discourses of work among VFF contributors reproduced problematic distinctions between creative work and technical work, isolating the site's infrastructural contributors from collaborative support.
2. Below-the-line fan studies
[2.1] Fan work is labor in the sense that it generates value (Turk 2014; Stanfill and Condis 2014). For some fan scholars, the stakes of research into fan labor have been tied to the question of whether fans are exploited by commercial media industries that profit from the value their work generates (Baym and Burnett 2009; Chin 2014; Stanfill and Condis 2014). Not all freely given labor is exploited, however (Terranova 2000), and not all forms of exploitation are equally exploitative. There are degrees of exploitation, just as there degrees of suffering and systemic unjust advantage that result from exploitation (Hesmondhalgh 2016). As Chin (2014) argues, scholars should be cautious about identifying exploitation at work in fan communities simply because fans work for free. Fans often seek out other forms of compensation: making friends, learning new skills, getting recognition, or simply passing time pleasurably (Baym and Burnett 2009; Ito 2012; Baruch 2020).
[2.2] Rather than focus on the exploitation of fans by commercial media industries, I want to make a case for locating the stakes of fan labor in the discursive construction of work among fan communities. Which forms of fan work are constructed by fans as more or less valuable? VFF is just one case study, but it is a useful example of a fan community that mapped industrial worker hierarchies onto itself. Fan communities are often distinguished from commercial media industries by their respective economies: while labor in a commercial media industry is commodified and exchanged for pay, labor in fan communities often contributes to a gift economy in which goods and services are circulated freely (Hellekson 2009; Scott 2009). Although VFF contributors participated in a gift economy in that nobody was paid and everybody contributed freely to the site, they nevertheless hierarchized their work in ways that purposefully mirrored the hierarchization of work in professional work communities.
[2.3] Rendered below-the-line workers discursively within their fan community, the infrastructural contributors to VFF are below-the-line laborers in a different sense than the one typically used by media scholars. As Mayer (2011) writes, professional status and creative worker status in media industries are used to distinguish between workers of more or less value, regardless of their actual contributions to their industries. Below-the-line workers in commercial media industries are not only perceived as less creative than their above-the-line counterparts; they're also paid less, work in more precarious conditions, and are frequently treated as external to the very industries that rely on them (Mayer 2011). All fan laborers are thus below-the-line workers in the commercial media industries in that their work contributes to media industries while being positioned as external to them. VFF's infrastructural contributors are below-the-line workers in an additional sense, however, in that they were discursively positioned as less creative and more marginal within the VFF community itself.
[2.4] Even in a gift economy, laborers form hierarchies (Chin 2018), in part because discourses of work render some contributions more or less valuable. Infrastructural work on fan sites, for example, often goes unnoticed and unacknowledged—at least until something goes wrong (Hadas 2009; Turk 2014). Characterizing such work as "invisible," Turk (2014, ¶2.1) calls on scholars to pay more attention to infrastructural fan workers: "We can better appreciate the scope of fandom's gift economy if we recognize that fannish gifts include not only art objects but the wide range of creative labors that surround and in some cases underlie these art objects" (¶1.2). As I examine in this study of exchanges between VFF contributors online, VFF embraced industrial discourses of creative work in ways that distinguished between the expectations and perceived value assigned to different forms of work on the project. Below-the-line contributors were recipients of significantly more pressure and less acknowledgment than their creative counterparts.
[2.5] Although virtual series have not often been the subject of fan scholarship, Nannicelli (2013) examines VFF within the context of screenwriting studies to argue that screenplays should be recognized as a form of literature because virtual series are read as such. Nannicelli also offers a useful definition for a virtual series: "a web-based, fan-authored television series that 'airs' in the form of uploaded texts that usually either present an entirely original narrative (original virtual series), continue the story-line of an actual television series that has ended (virtual continuations), or use certain elements of an actual series as jumping-off points to tell an original story (virtual-spin-offs)" (138). Nannicelli makes a compelling case that screenplays can be read as literature, but his emphasis on scripts as the primary texts of VFF neglects the invisible text—the StillFlying site—that made distributing the virtual series possible. As Nannicelli acknowledges, his argument considers the value of VFF for screenwriting studies "and not its relevance to theorizing fan fiction more broadly" (140). My analysis here of VFF helps fill that gap by examining a virtual series in the context of scholarship on fan labor.
3. It's not fan fiction; it's virtual TV
[3.1] In October 2005, shortly after the release of the Firefly spin-off film, Serenity (2005), a user on the site FireflyFans.net created a forum post expressing interest in writing a "virtual season 2" for the series (Ananti 2005a). Within a month, the thread was adopted as an intensive collaborative enterprise: Virtual Firefly, or VFF. Commenters offered suggestions for what VFF would include and, more insistently, how the virtual series should be constrained. For example, multiple commenters suggested that the season should be written in script format, "like a real season" (TheAccolade 2005), and that its narrative should mirror that of the film Serenity, since the show's creator, Joss Whedon, had claimed that the film told the story of what would have been Firefly's second season. Commenters also insisted that the project needed its own website, a space that would allow them to post scripts but also virtual packaging designs, special features, and behind-the-scenes materials. A dedicated site would also allow VFF contributors to demarcate official contributions to the project from the broader range of Firefly fan art on sites like FireflyFans.net. VFF contributors sought to distinguish not only their content but also their community as one with a particular structure and set of goals: the precise recreation of the second season of Firefly as it might have been.
[3.2] In their efforts to recreate that second season, VFF participants formed a fandom that affirmed canon, what obsession_inc (2009) calls affirmational fandom, in opposition to the more transformational Firefly fandoms they perceived around them. Other virtual seasons of Firefly were in the works at the same time, but VFF participants distinguished their project by noting that it would complete the unfinished first season as Whedon intended (gwek 2005). Whedon's intentions and distinctive authorial voice were of paramount importance to VFF contributors, who frequently referred to the Firefly showrunner as "Joss" or "the BDH" (Big Damn Hero). VFF readers active on the StillFlying forums also valued the virtual series for its fidelity to the original series, contrasting the script format of VFF episodes favorably to the prose format used for most fan fiction: one reader wrote of VFF, "I can actually imagine my actors saying things on here" (Kelai 2006a). There was even a running joke among StillFlying users that the head writer for VFF had been able to recreate the distinctive voice of the original series because he had Whedon locked in his cupboard. Implicit in these comments was the suggestion that VFF did more than further the story of Firefly; it seemed to recreate the experience of watching the original series as it was released, with the industrial trappings of the original series' distribution playing an important role in that experience.
[3.3] VFF contributors sought to recreate Firefly not only by mimicking the aesthetic qualities of the original series but also by structuring themselves into a community of workers and consumers that resembled a network television production. During the initial forum discussion on FireflyFans.net, a commenter offered his services as head writer. Eventually, the project would take on multiple producers, several staff writers, and apparent below-the-line workers, including a casting director and an art and technical director. These roles hierarchized VFF contributors while also siloing their contributions. Anyone could contribute to the body of Firefly fan fiction hosted on sites like FireflyFans.net, but defined positions and hierarchies of work among VFF contributors structured the fan fiction community in such a way that only some were able to contribute, and only in proscribed ways.
[3.4] In its efforts to mimic a commercial television production, VFF complicates scholarly models of fan labor that are based on transformational rather than affirmational fan work. Examining more egalitarian fan communities, Turk argues that gift economies among fans are "fundamentally asymmetrical" (2014, ¶3.4) because the people who receive the gifts outnumber those who provide them. Turk argues, however, that this asymmetry is "not a failure of the gift economy but an integral part of it" (¶3.5) because the continual circulation of gifts throughout fan communities benefits everyone by facilitating endless future contributions. Although Turk's arguments make sense for fan communities where barriers to participation are low, the same asymmetries have different meanings in fan enterprises like VFF. Writers who wished to join the VFF staff first had to audition, and the strict mission statement of the series foreclosed diverse takes on the Firefly universe. While administrators and moderators for sites like Archive of Our Own (AO3) and Wikipedia may be able to position themselves as public servants for their readers, infrastructural workers for sites like VFF participate in hierarches seeking to create a product first and a community of creators second.
[3.5] In December 2005, with a head writer and several staff members on board, the only thing keeping VFF from its launch was the lack of a website. The original poster from the FireflyFans.net thread had followed up with only one comment back in October, offering "to see about getting a domain/website set up" before asking, "Anybody here good with web designing?" (Ananti 2005b). Similarly, the head writer for the project acknowledged that he was "not particular [sic] tech savvy" and solicited "tech folks" on FireflyFans.net to ask if someone could "set up a forum or something for us" (gwek 2005). From the project's beginnings, VFF contributors distinguished between their creative expertise and the work that would need to be done by "tech folks" to create the site that would host the series. By year's end, Firefly fan Sean Young had signed on to create and run the StillFlying site, with the site launching in January 2006. Young's work, however, was not over.
4. "Help!"
[4.1] The hypervisibility of Young's work maintaining the StillFlying site often put him in a position of public pressure. Of the forty-four threads on the StillFlying "site business" forum, seventeen raised concerns about technical problems, with most addressed to Citizen, Young's StillFlying handle. Young was expected to deal with these problems quickly and on his own. Forum users often affectively expressed their frustration with all-caps letters and exclamation marks. For example, the StillFlying site was plagued by spam accounts. One post addressing the issue was entitled "Bot Hunt Please!!!!!" (gorramshiny 2007), while another was entitled "We Need to Fix the Spam Problem. NOW" (Kelai 2006b). Multiple posters hailing Young for technical work ended their posts with "Help!" (gwek 2006; JennS 2006). These technical issues were framed as urgent not because they made StillFlying.net unusable—as one user noted, "I'm ok just ignoring the f*cking spammers" (pizmobeach 2006b)—but rather because they threatened the status of the site as a legitimate fan enterprise.
[4.2] As Chin notes, "Fans are constantly, perhaps even unconsciously, vying for status within their fandoms" (2014, 15). VFF contributors were insistent about their distinction from ordinary fan fiction and their desire to create an immersive virtual series. Although spammers on the StillFlying forums arguably had little effect on VFF, they uncomfortably exposed the amateur status of the site's creators by drawing attention away from VFF's primary content—its scripts—and toward those aspects of the site that were meant to be invisible. By contrast, "creative" problems tied to the writing of the series were typically treated with patience by contributors and users alike as inevitable by-products of a volunteer enterprise. For instance, the release of VFF episodes was often delayed. It would take nearly three years after the launch of StillFlying.net for the site's contributors to finish writing the second season of VFF. When VFF readers asked about the expected release dates for new episodes, contributors would often remind readers that VFF was being written for free by contributors with day jobs.
[4.3] Conversely, technical issues were often positioned by users and contributors alike as urgent and unacceptable. When one StillFlying user pointed out a minor issue in the site interface (unread scripts being marked as read, and vice versa), Young was nudged by a contributor within twenty-four hours to respond and deal with the issue: "Uh, Citizen? Is your network crashing again? If she crashes, you crashed her" (dcwashington 2006). Yet VFF writers often used the StillFlying forums to solicit help from each other and even their readers for "creative" problems, Young's status as a technician isolated him from such collaborative support. VFF contributors sometimes offered Young broad suggestions about how to handle technical issues, but they left the work entirely to him. Phrases like "I'm not a coder" (pizmobeach 2006a) or "I'm hardly one to consult on technical matters" (cohnee 2006b) were used by writers as expressions of respect for Young's skills as a programmer, but they also indicate that the site's infrastructure, in contrast with its content, was not a collaborative responsibility.
5. Conclusion
[5.1] Of course, Young was not without agency. In his comments on the StillFlying forums, Young expressed the same love for Firefly and the same desire to see the series continued as the "creative" contributors to VFF. In his response to a post asking VFF users why there were so invested in keeping Firefly alive, Young described how the first run of the show in the United Kingdom had him "bushwhacked," how learning that the show had been canceled pulled the "proverbial rug" from under him, and how the film Serenity had renewed his fascination with the series and his desire to see it continue (Citizen 2006). Participation in VFF thus allowed Young to contribute to a fan object he desired as much as anyone. The purpose of this article is not to suggest that Young was exploited by his contributors but instead to critically examine how discourses of work among VFF contributors and users isolated him from collaborative support.
[5.2] VFF provides a useful counterexample to fan fiction communities offered on sites like AO3, where site administrators strive to create an egalitarian creative community rather than an end product. In contrast with fan fiction communities built around communal contributions, team-based enterprises like VFF draw on discourses of professionalism and creativity to hierarchize their contributors into above-the-line creatives and below-the-line workers, marginalizing below-the-line workers without the benefit of the authorial agency enjoyed by infrastructural contributors on more egalitarian fan fiction sites. For fan enterprises like VFF and for fan workers whose labor doesn't easily map onto above-the-line work in media industries, creative hierarchies and discourses of professionalism can put infrastructural fan workers in positions of public pressure and collaborative isolation.